“A Whole New World”: Mark Chadbourn’s Age of Misrule

Imagine that every belief you ever held is wrong. Religion, wrong. Science, wrong.  Reality itself, wrong.  Imagine that the world that you have grown relatively comfortable with over the course of your life suddenly reveals itself to be not at all what you imagined in the first place.  That every lesson, value, piece of common sense you have accrued from birth must be discarded like a superfluous skin, in order to survive.  Imagine that one day, you woke up, and the ancient gods had returned to reclaim the world of man.

This is the simple premise which Mark Chadbourn spins into his brilliant and riveting Age of Misrule trilogy–World’s End, Darkest Hour, and Always Forever–a mindshatteringly complex web of mythology and legend, both ancient and new, high fantasy, horror, pop culture, and philosophy.  Remarkably, the series could be defined by any one of those qualities, because they are all kept in tight balance; not one overwhelms or subsumes the others.  Age of Misrule is, yes, a grand, epic, quest novel in the vein of Tolkien, but it also has moments of terror that would not be out of place in Stephen King.  At the same time, it always remains rooted in the author’s vast knowledge of mythology.  Furthermore, from start to finish, Chadbourn is determined to examine the implications of what he has done to the world, not just as far as the physical and emotional toll it has taken on his characters but from a philosophical perspective, as well; his story, thus, transcends many a lurid fantasy guilty pleasure.

Returning to the Tolkien parallels, this is indeed a story about a band of unlikely traveling heroes, bound together by duty and friendship, who face the darkest of threats and most fearsome of odds in order to save their world from being swallowed up by a Dark Lord of unspeakable power.  The “little” people include Jack Churchill, or Church, as he is ironically dubbed, a cynical atheist who lost his drive and passion for life years before when his much beloved girlfriend, Marianne, slit her own wrists; Ruth Gallagher, a rather timid lawyer who has sacrificed her dreams in order to please her deceased father; Laura DuSantiago, a mouthy, sarcastic environmentalist who keeps everyone at arms’ length as a defense mechanism; Ryan Veitch, an ex-con with a bad temper who tries his hardest to redeem himself from his violent past; and Shavi, a bisexual shaman whose boyfriend was beaten to death in front of him, outside a gay bar, years before. Helping them along their way is Tom, an old, pot-smoking hippie with magical powers who serves as this series’ answer to Gandalf, if Gandalf were more of a pessimist and a fatalist with self-hatred issues.

You might have gleaned from the previous paragraph that this series does diverge quite a great deal from Tolkien, and that is to its credit.  That is not to say that Tolkienesque is not something that one should aspire to, but that in a literary landscape littered with Tolkienesque novels, a series that doesn’t reference Tolkien as a crutch but rather uses his work as a jumping-off point and as counterpoint, to comment on fantasy as a genre, is quite unique.  What Chadbourn has done is take the framework of The Lord of the Rings and set a similar quest in modern day Britain.  Tolkien’s work was a celebration of Celtic and British mythology.  He was attempting, in the manner of an archeologist/historian to create a credible retelling and homage of his homeland’s mythology, through intricate, meticulous research.  Chadbourn’s series springs from a similar impulse, but instead of reinvisioning the past, he lifts the mythology, wholecloth, and drops it into the present.  The Lord of the Rings is, ultimately, the tale of how magic gradually began to leave the everyday world.  Age of Misrule is the tale of how it returned. And there is no better setting than Britain, which seems to be one of the few places in the world that not only still has a rich mythological tradition but still has areas that have been all but untouched by the modern day, where one can travel an hour away from a modern, bustling city and find oneself at a medieval castle or abbey or even Stonehenge.

And, as previously mentioned, Chadbourn addresses the effects that such an upheaval as the return of magic would have on the human race, not just physically (i.e. the return of not only Celtic gods and mythological figures but faeries and wicked spirits and big, scary monsters as well leads to widespread, uncountable deaths) but philosophically, as well, and he does so in a very interesting manner.  Often, in novels such as these, when faced with the collapse of science, people can retreat into faith and religion.  In this series, however, the return of the old gods actually disproves religion, at least as it has evolved up to today.  In other words, how can people put their faith in Christianity, for example, when the gods that actually predated and inspired certain aspects of the religion are most literally walking around them, underlining the fact that everything they previously believed was wrong?  It’s hard to believe in angels when the beings that inspired these religious archetypes are standing before you and are most decidedly not full of grace.  Thus, religion and science are swept away in one fell swoop, leaving the human race with nothing to hold on to but themselves.

These philosophical quandaries are debated in conversations amongst the characters that manage to always, impressively, seem completely naturalistic.  Church and Co. never sound like mouthpieces for varying world views or like philosophy lessons in disguise. Instead, they are all complex, three-dimensional characters in their own rights, each of whom evolve, subtly and gradually, over the course of the series, in delicately crafted, intersecting arcs.  Age of Misrule wouldn’t be nearly as successful if the characters weren’t so involving.  Chadbourn also has the guts to not always make all of his protagonists likable.  They are all human to the core.  They screw up, they treat each other poorly, but they also reveal their essential good to one another and make one another better people in the long run.  I came to care about each of them more deeply than if the author had repeatedly reminded me why I should love each of them.  He, furthermore, causes them to suffer more than most heroes; he also, however, allows them each more acts of bravery and heroism than the average hero.

Along with the aforementioned naturalistic dialogue comes incredibly smooth exposition.  This novel requires a great deal of exposition and explanation, most of it voiced by the gang’s guru, Tom.  The world is overrun by magical creatures and gods, each of whom needs to be introduced and explained to the reader.  Chadbourn, in fact, treads over many of the same pieces of mythology that Elizabeth Bear utilizes in her Promethean Age series.  Bear, however, opts for the no-exposition-at-all route, leaving any reader who hasn’t recently brushed up on his or her incredibly obscure and esoteric Western mythology at a complete loss of comprehension, whereas Chadbourn explains everything but does it so well that the reader surreptitiously receives a wide-ranging education in British mythology that is as deep as it is broad.

Unlike most fantasy trilogies, which center around a single magical item, e.g. the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings, Age of Misrule, has four, each of them as inextricably bound to Celtic mythology as they are to Arthurian Legend.  As we learn over the course of the journey, mythology is all-encompassing.  The only barriers are those that we ourselves imagine.

Another rather unique feature of Age of Misrule is that, while Church is the man, so to speak, i.e. the Chosen One, he physically cannot accomplish his tasks without the four others.  They, however, are not merely his helpers. Dubbed the “Brothers and Sisters of Dragons,” all five of them together are the single hero that has the potential to save the day.  Every link in the chain must remain intact for the final battle to succeed, and it is to Chadbourn’s credit that, unlike most novels of this genre, so bleak and dire is the world’s situation that Church, Ruth, Shavi, Veitch, and Laura’s success is not the foregone conclusion it often seems in high fantasy novels such as this.  Sprinkled throughout the grimness and despair, however, Chadbourn includes moments of true awe and almost childlike wonder that promise that, no matter how scary and dangerous the world may have suddenly gotten, there is great beauty in store for humanity as well, if they have the strength to see past the dark.

These three truly stunning books culminate in a denouement as unexpected as it is thrilling.  In its final pages, we discover revelations that illuminate all that came before, lose people we came to care for deeply, and find ourselves and the characters thrust into an uncertain future.  By the time I reached the final page, I found myself completely satisfied by this sprawling, ingenious work but simultaneously desperate to get my hands on the next two trilogies in the series, neither of which, alas, are currently available in America.  Age of Misrule originally appeared approximately ten years ago in Britain and was only just recently published by Pyr Books in America.  I only hope it doesn’t take nearly as long for the next six books to arrive on our shores. Please, Pyr, make American editions of The Dark Age and The Kingdom of the Serpent trilogies your next top priority!

Buy:

World’s End (Age of Misrule #1)

Darkest Hour (Age of Misrule #2)

Always Forever (Age of Misrule #3)

Related posts:

1. The Last Crusade: Mark Chadbourn’s The Devil in Green
2. “Who Am I?”: Mark Chadbourn’s Lord of Silence
3. The End?: Mark Chadbourn’s The Hounds of Avalon
4. Dark Lady: Mark Chadbourn’s The Queen of Sinister
5. “Swyfte, Will Swyfte”: Chadbourn’s The Silver Skull